Quotes About Technology

The information comes via evolution.

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: "information theory.

Bits in the ether.

Human computers had no future, he saw:

What we call the past is built on bits. —John Archibald Wheeler

The code became known as the dot-and-dash alphabet, but the unmentioned space remained just as important; Morse code was not a binary language.*) That

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

So by 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States.

The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits.

Weather forecasting was the beginning but hardly the end of the business of using computers to model complex systems.

Actualmente, la información en -tiempo real- está considerada un derecho de nacimiento.

logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes"—

biology has become an information science

It makes my head explode when there are people who think you can do everything in HTML.

Smart bombs do not compensate for dumb kids.

I often think that the Romans were fortunate; their civilization reached as far as hot baths without touching the fatal knowledge of machinery.

Couldn't they invent something automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?

R2-D2 zithered, then buzzed.

Visions are projections of one's fundamental beliefs and assumptions about human nature, technology, economics, science, politics, art, ethics, and the like. A vision of the future is much like a literary or musical theme. It's the paramount, persistent, and pervasive message that you want to convey, the frequently recurring melody that you want people to remember; and whenever repeated, it reminds the audience of the entire work.

She notes how advances in brain imaging technology prove that people's brains are wired to overestimate risk, exaggerate its consequences, and underestimate their ability to handle it. Accordingly, fear about what people don't want to happen drives their choices more often than a commitment to what they wish to see.

The big break from the past may come when speech recognition software is perfected. At that point we'll be able to write simply by talking: Speak into your computer's recorder, and it'll do all the messy work of punctuation and spelling. This could result in the elimination of the keyboard, [Dennis] Baron speculates. 'We'd get back to oral composition--reinventing Homer.

Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one's pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

The library of the future may very well be twofold: an underground repository for precious old books published prior to 1980 which no one sees or handles, plus a crisp reading disk to which chips from any library in the world are delivered electronically as you dial for them.